


You've Got Two Hands

by NervousAsexual



Category: Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, Multi, Polyamory, qpps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 11:22:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11057901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: Cosmo doesn't have a name or a soul-mate like other folks do. But who makes up the rules, anyway?





	You've Got Two Hands

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Soulmates](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6329863) by [ReleasingmyInsanity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReleasingmyInsanity/pseuds/ReleasingmyInsanity). 



> As per ReleasingmyInsanity's story: "A soulmate AU where only romantic soulmates "count" and aro/ace people don't get a name."

When people asked (and for some reason they did), Cosmo would say he didn't have time for a soulmate. He had stuff to do! (Here he'd punctuate with a smash of the keyboard.) People to see! (Smash!) Babies to kiss! (Smash!) And then somebody would actually hand him a baby and he'd make a goofy face at them and the baby would either start to cry or stab him in the eye with their little baby fingers.

He would hand the baby off to Don and Don would look like a cow stranded on the tracks with the train bearing down and he'd laugh and laugh.

"You don't have to draw attention to it, you know," Don told him once. "If you wore long sleeves nobody would see."

Which had worked for a while... cardigan sweaters, dress shirts, fancy gloves. But the trouble was, even when it wasn't visible things still came up in conversation. People would chat with Don, listing all the Kathys they knew, and somebody would say, "What about you, Cosmo?  I don't remember what your name was."

Don would offer to help him bluff. "We can make up a name. A common one, like Ann or Mary or something." But why should he bother going to all that effort?

"Don't have one," he'd say, and when people pressured him he'd show them his blank wrists. No name, no soulmate.

And some people would be satisfied. Not all of them. He knew by the way they stared. "Maybe your soulmate just hasn't been born yet." And then they'd side-eye him--almost thirty and still no soulmate? This was how child predators started... Or, as kinder folk would say, maybe his soulmate died before he was born.

So that was that. He was a cradle-robbing creep, a sad tragic man whose soulmate had probably died long ago, or else he was just broken.

Luckily Don would put a stop to the bolder comments. Even Lina Lamont had made a comment once--but only once.

"I should just write your name on me," Cosmo joked one day, noodling out a tune on the piano. "We spend enough time together."

"Don't even joke about that." Don stopped lacing up his tap shoes. "It isn't the same thing." He sounded much more emotional than Cosmo had anticipated.

He rubbed the inside of his wrist against his sweater and played a couple of long continuous chords low on the keys. "Sorry."

"You don't understand, Cosmo." Don stared hard at the name on his wrist and traced the letters with a fingertip. "How could you understand?"

Don always did take things too seriously, Cosmo thought, but it was still hard not to feel hurt.

* * *

Don let him look at the name a couple of times, always very solemnly and soberly so that, Cosmo guessed, he knew it was a Big Deal.

"So if you don't find your Kathy, will any Kathy do?" he joked, but Don--what a romantic!--pulled his arm away.

"She has my name," Don said. "I have her name and she has mine."

Well, obviously. As if he hadn't heard that story in every movie Don had ever made, in every movie anyone else ever made either.

There was one other person on the lot who seemed to have name trouble. That Zip Girl, Zelda Zanders, always kept hers covered up with a corsage and never seemed to be terribly interested in finding the person who had her name. Cosmo had to admit that was just good business sense. Who was her soulmate? Could it be you or could it be you? It gave her an air of mystery that didn't usually come with flapper skirts and bobbed hair.

More importantly, although Zelda was kind of a snob, always prancing around after Lina Lamont, she was one of the only people who never brought up Cosmo's lack of a name. Live and let live, he figured.

* * *

He always knew the day was supposed to come when Don would find the Kathy with his name on her wrist. But that day always seemed very far away. He always imagined Kathy would come into their lives--that is, Don's life--with a fanfare of trumpets and an entire Greek chorus to announce her arrival. That was how it happened in the movies, right?

But nope, she just popped out of a cake one day and there she was.

Don went so obviously head over heels that even Cosmo could tell what was up, but even if he hadn't the proof was right there on her arm. "Don." She had slender wrists so he guessed the entirety of "Donald" wouldn't fit on there. He told them so on the day they all met in the sound stage. Kathy laughed. She wasn't so bad, he decided. If somebody had to be soulmates with Cosmo's best friend, it might as well be her.

* * *

Lina, as they probably should have expected, had a conniption as soon as word about Don's soulmate leaked out. She was his soulmate, she insisted. It said so, right on her wrist: Donald. When Don pointed out the fact that it wasn't her name on his wrist, she took a makeup pencil and wrote his last name out below it. "Donald Lockwood," it read. Lina, Cosmo couldn't help but notice, had very nice handwriting. It was about the only nice thing about her.

But the Lina shenanigans were the least of Don's concerns. Soulmate or not, Don's first love was performing, and frankly this new Lockwood and Lamont film, the talkie, was one wayward cigarette spark from going up in flames.

He did his best to make Don feel better with jokes, and Kathy did her best with a late-night breakfast snack. All was for naught. If anybody had nuclear powered moping skills, it was Don.

"This is sweet of both of you," he told them, "but I..."

Cosmo looked at Kathy and Kathy looked at Cosmo and it felt like there was an entire conversation in that look.

"Nope," Cosmo told him. "We'll go back into vaudeville. Fit as a fiddle and ready for love, I could jump over the moon up above..."

At that Don laughed. "Too bad I didn't do that in Dueling Cavelier. Maybe they would have liked it."

"Why don't you?" Kathy demanded.

"What?"

"Make the Dueling Cavelier into a musical." Cosmo gestured wildly. "It's the new Don Lockwood. He yodels, he jumps about to music!"

Don frowned.

"Look, there's six weeks." Cosmo pointed to the calendar. "That's time enough to turn this trainwreck around."

"Trim the bad scenes, add a few new ones..." Kathy added.

He stared at the calendar, and then he turned back and maybe Kathy didn't know that look because she hadn't known him so long, but Cosmo knew that they had him.

"Why not?" Don asked. "Let's do it. Let's make it a musical."

If anything ever called for a dance number that was it.

So they danced, all three of them, all over that house. And he found himself holding Kathy's hand as she held Donald's. That was a fluke, he told himself. Even if it did warm the anemic little cockles of his heart.

"You're a genius," Kathy told Don when it came time for her to head back home, and kissed him on the lips.

"Yeah," Cosmo said. "So glad you thought of it."

"Oh, Cosmo," she said, and she stood up on her toes and kissed him on the mouth too.

He looked at his wrist but found it still blank, which surprised him. In that moment he had come to a conclusion, and that was that he loved Kathy Selden every bit as much as he loved Don Lockwood.

* * *

To Lina's credit she waited until opening night before she made her move. Who would have guessed that Lina Lamont could be sneaky?

So naturally they turned the trap back on her, and when she fled the theater in embarrassment Cosmo found himself quite satisfied. Lina's lawyers would have a field day in the morning, but what did that matter tonight?

One member of Lina's little cohort did stay behind, though. When Don and Kathy had made their way out and the audience came trailing after, who should still be sitting in the front row, crying balefully, but Zelda Zanders.

"Hiya," he told her, plopping down on the edge of the stage across from her. She glared at him but didn't stop crying. "Aw, don't feel bad. You'll always be the Zip Girl of my heart." Still she didn't stop. "What? Did we do something to you? Is your career collateral damage in all this? What's wrong?"

In response she ripped the corsage right from her wrist and shoved her hand toward him, palm up.

Even upside down he could read the name.

_Lina_.

A creeping sensation went up his spine. "What's that supposed to mean? For all I know you just wrote it on with pencil."

Zelda rubbed the corsage against the name and pulled it away. It hadn't smeared even a little.

"Oh." For some reason this was a lot to take in. "Does Lina know?"

Zelda shrugged and wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Dunno."

"Well, maybe it's not that Lina. Maybe it's another Lina."

She shook her head. "No. It's her."

"But how do you know? Her name isn't Zelda."

"You just know. That's all."

She probably didn't mean it to be condescending but it irked Cosmo just the same. "Is that right? Then boy, do I feel bad for you."

"Get lost, Cosmo."

He chose to ignore that. "Do you have an eyebrow pencil?"

"Probably. So what?"

He held out his hand and after a moment she got out her clutch and dug out a pencil. She handed it to him, and he held out his other hand.

"What?"

He took her arm and underneath "Lina" he added a few more words.

Zelda pulled her arm back and looked down at it.

"Lina Lamont loves Zelda Zanders," she read.

"Not bad, right?" Cosmo stuck the pencil behind his ear. "And she can't argue with it 'cause it says it all right there."

Zelda frowned down at her arm.

"Thanks," she said at last.

He gave her a lazy salute. The pencil slid down from his ear and he picked it back up and wrote a name on his wrist.

"What are you doing now?" Zelda asked.

He swapped hands and--a little slower and a lot messier--he wrote a name on his other wrist.

"What  _are_ you doing?"

He handed her back the pencil and took off for the doors. It was a theater on opening night--Don and Kathy couldn't have gone far.

He found them in the manager's office, gathering up glasses for a toast.

"You finally made it!" Kathy said when she saw him.

"Took ya long enough," Don grumbled, but he smiled as he said it.

"I've gotta show you something," he told them.

They obligingly stopped what they were doing to look.

He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. "Okay, look here. I know it's not the same. Got it, Don? I know it isn't the same thing. But..."

He held out his wrists and watched them as they read first the name "Kathy," written neatly on his left wrist, and then the name "Don" written in sloppier writing on his right.

"I've got two wrists," he told them.

They looked at the names and he felt the worry churning in his stomach and then they looked up at him and he saw the smiles on their faces and he realized he didn't have to worry after all.

"Your name's a little long," Kathy said, "but I've got two wrists too, Cosmo."

"What a coincidence!" Don held out his blank wrist. "So do I."

He grinned at them both so hard his face felt like it would break.

"Got a pencil?" he asked.

"Left it at home," Kathy said. "Shall we go home and get it?"

Don looked to Cosmo and he felt all warmth and happiness streaming from the three of them.

"Let's do it," he said. "Let's go home.


End file.
